Purple Night

I recently took a solo boat trip down to DeCourcy Island and I was hoping to make some decent nighttime images.  I had been messing around on the other side of the island where my day time scouting had determined that I was going to get the best images, (turned out I couldn’t get anything good there), and was heading back to my dinghy when I saw a boat behind this old tree.  It was very dark out, almost 10:30, so it took a little bit of work to get myself and my tripod into a position to frame the boat between the two branches.  The wind was starting to come up so the fellow on the boat was going out to check the lines coming off his stern, (the green lights extending from the back of the boat are from his head lamp shining on the water as he paddle to shore).  I did four exposures of a minute each and I felt lucky that the boat was relatively sharp in this one as it was quite windy and I was sure that the motion would show up as blur.  Using a wide angle lens, 10mm, allowed me to get close to the tree and have it dominate the frame but even though the moon was out there wasn’t enough light on it so I lit it up with my flashlight during the long exposure.  I am quite happy with the result.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Painting With Light

In my last post I was playing with light indoors, both as a modifier to the image and as the subject.  For these pictures I was playing with light as I rode home on the ferry.  I live on an island so riding the ferry is a regular part of my life and one evening as we were approaching Nanaimo I was out on the deck with my camera and tripod.  I was in the bow of the boat as we headed in close to the city and I used a 30second exposure with my lens at it’s widest focal length, (17mm)  I held it there for several seconds then zoomed in during the exposure to create the light trails and stayed at the longest focal length, (55mm) for several more seconds.  When I got it back to my computer I played with the saturation and the contrast quite a bit to get a pretty striking image.  Luckily it was a pretty calm night, so the boat was not moving up and down and my light trails have just enough movement in them to give the thread like appearance but not so much that they are jiggling all over the place.  The long exposure also smoothed out the water providing a nice contrast to the harsh lines of light in the top of the frame.  The image is a not a literal representation of anything, but rather my light painting of Nanaimo at night.  Below are some of my other experiments with light on that same ferry trip.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Celebration

The weight of the crowd is massive.  You can feel it pushing in against you from every side.  You feel it and yet there is an energy, a lightness to it that pushes back against the sheer mass of people and seems to lift you together with every other person.  There are people everywhere, for blocks and block and blocks there are nothing but streets filled with people.  The energy that rise off of each of us produces a heady mixture of excitement, anticipation, and joy.  It seems so amazing, so wonderful that all of the thousands have gathered in downtown Vancouver to celebrate and we are all, together, happy.

Getting a photograph that captured the miraculous atmosphere that pervaded downtown Vancouver throughout most of the 2010 Olympic games was a challenge. The lights of Granville St. were too large a visual monument to be left out so I knew I wanted to include them.  The crowds had to be included so I lifted my camera over my head, luckily I am tall, and prepared to take the shot.  I saw a man carrying a flag drift into view.  I didn’t want the overt patriotism of the flag completely unfurled, rather I wanted the more subtle statement that I think the partially hidden flag makes.  I waited until the guy carrying the flag was in the centre of the frame and the flag was a little lower.  I snapped and I knew I had what I was looking for.

-Russell Berg